S1M0NE (2002)

FILM REVIEW; Got It All (Except a Life)

Andrew Niccol's ''Simone'' is like the punch line to a joke that's been going around for years. It has been told better, and been funnier, elsewhere.

The movie is about a down-to-his-last-Bentley director, Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino), who finds success with a virtual superstar, Simone.

His discovery is a computer-generated actress -- a brilliantly devised computer program that serendipitously falls into Taransky's hands. ''Simone'' starts with a great joke. Mr. Pacino, bedraggled and beaten, is a supplicant in his first scene.

His Taransky, once a major creative force, is reduced to following the arbitrary demands of a finicky movie-star princess. He is picking through a bowl of Mike and Ike candies to remove all of the red ones that the tiny diva Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder) detests before she sees them and throws a fit. Despite his desperate efforts, Nicola withdraws from her leading role in his half-finished film after her latest tantrum, leaving him finished.

The studio head Elaine Christian (Catherine Keener) -- who's also Taransky's ex-wife -- is ruthless about chucking him into the refuse pile. ''Fired by the mother of my child,'' he says, stunned. Taransky's movies certainly sound eminently missable -- with titles like ''Sunrise Sunset'' and ''Eternity Forever.''

The writer-director Mr. Niccol is satirizing the kinds of dazzling empties he himself has made. (He also gets in a reference to the obscurist auteur Andrei Tarkovsky by making Taransky's name so close.) Mr. Niccol is fascinated with surfaces -- the films he's been involved with (he wrote ''The Truman Show'' and wrote and directed ''Gattaca'') are a mix of populism and deconstruction. His newest effort, ''Simone,'' goes beyond postmodern to post-entertainment -- it's tepid and vapid. Too bad, because he's cognizant of a fact that most filmmakers don't admit: they're suckers for superficiality.

Taransky's middlebrow motivation for making pictures is both portentous and simplistic. He sets out to ''illuminate hearts and minds with a ray of truth.'' And the frustrated director gets the chance when Hank Aleno (Elias Koteas), an admirer and computer visionary in failing health, hands his last invention to Taransky. It's a computer program called Simulation One, which Taransky shortens to Simone. She's the director's alter ego -- his dream actress, since she's essentially Taransky recreated in cyberspace.

The simulated Simone is played by a very un-virtual actress, Rachel Roberts. Mr. Niccol cleverly makes her Simone a slightly ethereal presence by rendering her mouth a bit blurred even as the camera often lingers on it -- she's so exquisite she's almost out of focus. To fool the world, Taransky comes up with the ruse that his new find, Simone, has demanded that she never work in the same room with anyone else and that she will act only for Taransky -- which seems just mildly eccentric after Nicola's tantrums.

Plotwise, this is a virtual ''Tootsie,'' and Mr. Niccol gets some lightweight farce out of Taransky's straining to keep the world away from his nonexistent prodigy, a task that becomes all the more difficult once Simone becomes the biggest star in the world. The problem is that Simone herself isn't as exciting a cyberpresence as the video-game icon Lara Croft, who was a real-world version of this pop phenomenon. This movie could have been directed by the HAL 9000.

Elaine quickly returns to her ex-husband's side to have a chance at working with the magical Simone. Enchanted, she describes Simone as having ''the body of Sophia Loren, the, well, grace of the young Grace Kelly.''

''That's almost right,'' Taransky agrees. He is lionized by some of the press, while others -- most notably the tabloid snail Max Sayer (Pruitt Taylor Vince) -- call the director a domineering prison warden and Svengali. When an exhausted Taransky wants to put all the noise behind him and stages Simone's disappearance, Sayer whips up an international frenzy about a possible murder with Taransky as the perpetrator.

If ''Simone,'' which opens nationwide today, isn't up to snuff, some of the film's performances are. Ms. Keener is good in her part but she should never play a barracuda in a business suit ever again -- the kind of woman who puts the petty in competitive -- because she's played it so often before. But Mr. Pacino turns febrile exhaustion into a comic style. Evan Rachel Wood displays a charming patience as Taransky's daughter. And Mr. Vince gives the hard-hearted vulture Sayer another, more vulnerable, side.

This is part of the motif that occasionally clicks in -- the changes that Simone evokes in people, like Nicola. In this role, Ms. Ryder is better playing at an actress -- showing the structure behind her access to tears and quivers -- than she's been in anything for a long time.

The scene in which a chastened Nicola reports to Taransky to audition for a role in his newest film -- she's desperate to work with Simone -- has an appealing hilarity. Brechtian and supple, it gets to the picture's theme -- our need to be taken in, and how simple it is for talent to hypnotize us -- better than anything else in ''Simone.''

Imagine if ''The Wizard of Oz'' were about the pathetic machinations of the man behind the Almighty Oz instead of Dorothy's quixotic adventures -- that's what ''Simone'' is, and why it doesn't work.

Because the material gives off such a delicious vibe, even though the movie itself feels a little old, you want to like ''Simone.'' It would be easier if it were a more forceful comedy. But Mr. Niccol's style is that of reticence -- as a director, he's a little coquettish.

When Simone becomes a worldwide singing sensation, the opportunity is blown because the payoff is so tepid. She ''sings'' -- through the computer program -- Aretha Franklin's ''Natural Woman,'' which may be the most overused song in the movies this side of James Brown's ''I Feel Good.''

At those moments when he needs the impact of a high, hard fastball, Mr. Niccol comes up with a slow, underhand toss. It may get across the plate, but so what? The result is a virtual comedy instead of a comedy about virtuality.

''Simone'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for strong language, alcohol use and virtual suggestions of sexuality and violence.

SIMONE

Written, produced and directed by Andrew Niccol; director of photography, Edward Lachman; edited by Paul Rubell; music by Carter Burwell; production designer, Jan Roelfs; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 100 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.